Column

Atheism

Creed

29 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 6: making the leap

In her series’ final article, philosopher Stefani Ruper offers a new vision we all need.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

A skydiver in a space pressure shoot leaps from a capsule above the earth.

Felix Baumgartner leap set the record for freefall parachuting.

Red Bull Stratos.

Faith is irrational. Faith is against evidence. Faith is a threat to progress. Faith will bring about the downfall of civilization.

I used to think this, and I wasn’t alone.

In 2004 Sam Harris wrote that faith

“allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”

This quote appears in his book The End of Faith, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks.

Fellow pop atheist AC Grayling says that faith

“directly controverts canons of intellectual integrity…’Faith’ is not a respectable or admirable thing; having been so long paraded as a virtue and worthy of respect, the truth is otherwise… it is irresponsible, lazy, and too often dangerous.”

The real danger

When I was about 20, I realised that I had dismissed faith as irrational without ever engaging it. I had prided myself on open-mindedness while at the same time refusing to hear what people of faith had to say. This struck me as deeply hypocritical, so I went to seminary. I asked religious people about faith. I studied what theologians and philosophers said about it. I did this for about twelve years.

In this time, I confirmed my earlier belief that there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in religion. Of course there are! But there are extreme examples of irrationality and close-mindedness in secularism, too. The danger isn’t “faith.” The danger is what I used to do: over-simplifying and reducing one another to easy targets so we can tear each other down.

Faith, I now know, looks very different to many people. Some forms of it are healthier than others. Some are toxic.

But after more than twelve years of study, I’ve come to believe a specific way of defining or practicing faith is not just acceptable for our society but crucial. I consider it the answer to many of our shared needs--especially for more love, generosity, justice, resilience, progress, and hope.

It's this:

a choice.

Faith is a choice.

Our society is unique among all societies that have ever existed. It is the first society where we must choose: to trust and believe just a little bit, or to distrust and believe nothing at all.

This is what “don’t believe” looks like:

Distrust. Stick to the “bare facts” of physical reality and science. Live as though there is no possibility of any dimensions existing beyond material reality as we understand it today.

There is no Creator, no ultimate love, no ultimate home. There is only the here and now. When you die, nothing happens.

I subscribed to this option for thirty years because I thought it necessary to be loyal to the truth. I thought that being a good person meant resisting the temptations of faith. I felt proud of myself for bravely accepting the emptiness of the world. But it was poor consolation.

Another reason I followed this option was because I—like most people in our culture—had a deeply rooted habit of suspicion and distrust. Authorities of all kinds have so routinely deceived and disappointed us that most of us live habitually expecting to be attacked, hurt, let down, duped, used, manipulated, and misled. We must always expect there’s a trick behind any promise. Every offering has a catch. We subconsciously live by the slogan “it’s too good to be true.”

This predisposes us to experiencing a specific kind of harm: when we anticipate being hurt, we often hurt ourselves first so that we get to be in control of the pain. For the first thirty years of my spiritual journey, part of my resistance to God was that I was so afraid of finding out He didn’t exist I never let myself take seriously the possibility that He might.

Here’s what “believe” looks like:

Trust. Take a look at your options and say “yes,” to the better one, the one rich in possibility and hope and light.

Embrace the possibility that there are dimensions of reality beyond our imagining that we cannot see or touch. Embrace the possibility that your story may be a part of some larger story. Embrace the possibility that what you do matters ultimately, and is a part of the great unfolding of a narrative beyond your comprehension.

Do this with lightness. Have a bold vision, but let a part of that boldness be its ability to change and grow. Trust the community of spiritual seekers all around the world. Hold all your opinions as hypotheses, and seek to refine them in community with others as different from you as possible.

Open yourself to the possibility that you might be able to experience the love of God and walk into greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity than previously.

Responsible faith

Harris and Grayling say faith is belief against evidence.

However: faith can be deeply evidentiary. Done right, faith never contradicts evidence or quality reasoning. Indeed, to me, faith means being loyal to every scrap of evidence, including any that God may provide us, and constantly revising my views of everything.

There are two kinds of evidence for transcendent beliefs: intellectual evidence, which includes historical, archaeological, and philosophical reasons to believe (or not to believe), and experiential evidence, which comes from believing in God and seeing what happens.

For each of us, experiential evidence is personal, but we can, and should, always talk about our experiences with others. We should get feedback, compare, and learn from one another. I consider my experiences to be data points for God, but I’m open to being incorrect.

Faith of the sort I’m advocating doesn’t mean putting your head in the sand. It means walking simultaneously with trust and with your eyes wide open. It means embracing your own limitations and learning to delight in being proved wrong or revising your perspective.

The obligation to have faith

Many people come to faith in God through a major religious experience. They have a sudden shift. They go from skeptic to Believer with a capital “B” seemingly overnight.

That is not how it’s worked for me. I decided to see if I could believe. When I first set out to cultivate faith, I didn’t believe anything at all.

Why did I do it?

I had one very specific reason: it would make the world a better place.

I already knew that belief in God was reasonable, and that God might exist. I already knew that I could get evidence for God if I dared to believe a little bit first.

But what convinced me to finally try believing was an argument William James makes in his essay Is Life Worth Living? He says:

if there is something you can believe in that is reasonable, and that will make you either a happier or better person, or both,

then you are not just licensed, but obliged to believe it.

Not just licensed, but obliged. Believing in God was not just reasonable but would also make me more of all the things I always wanted to be: more joyful, more peaceful, more generous, more resilient.

Thus, I was facing a dual realization:

God might be real, and

Trying to see if I could believe—that is, intentionally opening myself to God’s potential presence in my life—would be an act both of exploring truth as well as making me a better person.

Put like this, the next step for me was obvious:

Do it.

Choose faith. Choose trust. Take a chance on God, and see what happens.

That was eleven months ago now, and I can honestly say it was the best thing I’ve ever done. My belief is far from certain, but it doesn’t have to be—indeed, in some ways it shouldn’t be.

I just keep saying yes to trust, and my heart is lighter and more free than I ever imagined possible.

Taking a chance on God

The secular poet Mary Oliver once famously asked us:

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

What will I do? What will you do?

If faith means taking a chance on God and seeing what happens – and in doing so stepping into lives of greater peace, joy, resilience, and generosity, together –

What are any of us waiting for?

Article

America

Church and state

Creed

Politics

19 February 2025

6 min read

Trump is the new Constantine - but he's no Saviour

Trump’s second coming invites imperial comparisons. Are they accurate?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A montage shows Donald Trump as a Roman emperor leaning on a sword

Pax Americana.

Reddit.

After years of polarised politics, nepotism from previous rulers and disputed claims to power, an unpredictable and egotistical leader believes that God had saved him to make the nation great again. He is acclaimed as the most powerful leader in the world and instantly surprises everyone by issuing a raft of disruptive new measures to radically change the way society functions and announces that he is going to target anti-Christian bias in society.

Sounds familiar?

No, it’s not Donald Trump. It is the fourth century ruler of the Roman empire – Constantine the Great. And the parallels are striking.

Constantine, the son of a Roman general and a Balkan barmaid, was the first Christian Roman emperor. Before then, all emperors were pagans, worshipping the Greek and Roman gods. In the early 300s AD, the emperor Diocletian launched a period of intense persecution of Christians, aimed at suppressing their subversive influence. After it died down, and after years of political infighting within the empire, Constantine marched on the capital and defeated his enemy Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome. Just before the battle, Constantine had a dream in which he saw a sign of something that looked like a cross in the sky, with the tagline “in this sign, conquer”. From that time onwards, he believed that God had chosen him for this direct purpose – to bring peace to the empire by conquering its enemies, internal and external, under the banner of Christianity.

After his accession Constantine, like Trump, introduced new economic policies to reverse rampant inflation, restructured government, and strengthened military capacity to deter the empire’s enemies. He also started to give privileges to the until-now persecuted Christians. Paganism, the ‘official’ religion of the empire was increasingly relegated to second place. Churches were granted land on which to build new edifices, and gatherings of Christian leaders became commonplace, some of which he presided over, such as the Council of Nicaea which took place in 325 AD, 1,700 years ago this year. Christian priests were excused from public duties to give themselves to their prayers. Crucifixion was abolished as a form of execution. Sunday became a weekly holiday, pagan practices were outlawed in public.

Historians have debated Constantine’s motivation for years. Was he a genuine Christian, wanting to advance the faith by giving the church a good run at converting the empire? Was he a boon for the church in releasing it from the burden of persecution? Certainly, at the time, many Christians were delighted, enjoying their new privileges and access to the imperial court like wide-eyed pastors invited to the White House. Eusebius, the great historian of the early church wrote: “in every city the victorious emperor published decrees full of humanity and laws that gave proof of munificence and true piety. All tyranny had been purged away.” It could be the voice of a Southern Baptist.

Yet on the other hand, Constantine was irascible, unpredictable and vindictive. He had his second wife, three brothers-in-law, his eldest son and his father-in-law executed.

His vanity extended to renaming the old city of Byzantium, newly made the capital of the empire after himself – Constantinople. Was he cynically using the growing cultural force of Christianity to bring unity to a divided and fragmenting empire? Some historians suggest that in doing so, he fatally changed the nature of Christianity. Constantine was exactly the kind of military messiah that first century Jews had expected, yet one totally different from the crucified rabbi from Nazareth.

Which was it? It's hard to tell. He certainly promoted the Christian faith and gave it new freedoms. Yet, although he presided over the Council of Nicaea, with its famous decree that Christ shared the same nature (‘consubstantial’ was the technical term) as God the Father, there is little mention of Jesus in Constantine’s religion. He sometimes seems to have thought of himself as the Saviour of the Church rather than Christ, with the watershed of history not in the first century with the victory over sin and death in the Resurrection of Jesus, but in the fourth century with his own victory over Maxentius.

For some historians, the Christian church was originally a counter-cultural movement, offering a radical new vision of life, favouring the poor over the rich, the weak over the powerful, centred on the crucified Jesus. After Constantine, Christianity became centred on a majestic ruler of the heavens and the earth. Christ the Pantokrator, the image of Christ in glory found in Orthodox churches around the world replaced images of Christ on the cross. This was, they suggest, not Constantine being formed into the image of Christ, but Christ being conformed to the image of Constantine.

Christians might be glad of the opportunities that a Trumpian world might offer. But they need to be careful in what they wish for

The similarities with Donald Trump will be obvious, even if different readers will vary on how they see the extent of the likeness. They both favoured Christianity even though their own personal faith is hard to pin down. They can both be ruthless and vindictive towards those that cross them. They are not afraid to tear up the rule book and adopt new policies that shake up the established order.

So, what might the story of Constantine have to tell us as we consider the second coming of Donald Trump?

Many Christians rejoiced at Trump’s re-election. At his inauguration, Franklin Graham, like Eusebius many centuries before, pronounced that God had ‘raised up’ the new President. Trump himself claimed that God had saved him through the assassination attempt last year to Make America Great Again. Others see it as a disaster, offering a ruler of dubious character who looks nothing like Jesus.

Constantine was, on balance, a mixed blessing for the church. His rule did enable the church to thrive. It gave it a position within society that made possible a network of churches, parishes, dioceses that helped its message spread far and wide. It was no doubt easier to be, and to become a Christian under Constantine than under his anti-Christian predecessors. Yet at the same time, he subtly changed the shape of Christianity and made the Church the faith of the powerful, even though Christianity has always flourished more among the poor and struggling who know they need help.

The Church under Trump might be glad of laws and cultural moves that make it easier to practice and promote their faith. Yet the danger of allowing Trump rather than Jesus to determine the Church's vision of leadership and lordship, remains. In subsequent years, while making the most of the opportunities that a newly Christianised empire gave, the church also needed figures like Ambrose, the fourth century Bishop of Milan who was willing to ban the emperor Theodosius from church when he committed crimes in the name of the empire. It also needed the radical Christianity of the desert fathers and mothers who withdrew to remote places to pray and live a radically alternative lifestyle from the increasingly soft and easy Christianity of city life. As Paul Kingsnorth recently reminded us, “the monks built the West, just as surely as the soldiers did, and they built the more enduring part.”

Christians might be glad of the opportunities that a Trumpian world might offer. But they need to be careful in what they wish for. Followers of the crucified rabbi from Nazareth need to be wary of hitching their wagon to any one political ruler. There is only one messiah after all.

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